Operations: fulfilment, packaging & compliance
A routing guide is the document a retailer hands you before your first purchase order ships. It says which carrier moves the freight, who pays for it, how the pallets are built and labelled, what has to appear on the bill of lading, and when the truck is allowed to arrive at their dock. It is not advice. The deductions for getting it wrong come off your invoice without a conversation.
The closest thing you already know is the Send to Amazon workflow. Amazon sets the box limits, generates the labels, assigns a carrier through the partnered programme and gives you a shipment ID that the receiving building expects to see. A routing guide is the same machinery run by a company that is not Amazon, written as a PDF instead of a wizard, and enforced with deductions instead of a rejected shipment.
What is a routing guide, and why does the retailer control your freight?
A retail distribution centre is a queue with doors. Each door has a time slot, each slot has a crew, and the whole building is planned around trucks arriving when they said they would. If two hundred suppliers each picked their own carrier and turned up when it suited them, the building would jam by Tuesday.
So the retailer takes the decision away from you. They negotiate freight rates with a small set of carriers at volumes you will never touch, then instruct every supplier to use those carriers so the volume stays concentrated. You lose control of the truck and usually gain a freight cost lower than anything you could buy on your own. That trade is the entire point of the document.
The guide itself is twenty to eighty pages, or the same content sitting behind a login in a supplier portal. It is written for a warehouse manager, not a founder, and it assumes you already speak the language. Find the section for domestic suppliers shipping into the distribution network and read that first. Most of the rest covers imports, direct-to-store delivery, hazardous goods and categories you do not sell.
Two parts matter more than everything else: the routing rules, which decide how your shipment gets a carrier, and the compliance rules, which cover labels, pallets and paperwork. Get those right and the remaining pages are detail.
Prepaid or collect: who actually pays for the truck
Three arrangements cover almost every purchase order you will see.
Prepaid means you arrange and pay the freight, and the cost is buried inside your wholesale price. You own the carrier relationship and the risk until delivery. Small independent accounts often work this way, and it is the only version that feels like FBA inbound.
Collect means the retailer's carrier collects from your dock and the retailer pays the carrier directly. The freight never appears in your books. In exchange you use their carrier on their schedule, and you have to request routing rather than just booking a pickup.
Prepaid and charged means you arrange the freight and add the actual cost to the invoice as a separate line. It is the least common of the three and the most likely to be queried by accounts payable, because the amount was never on the purchase order.
Sitting underneath all of this is the freight term, usually written as FOB origin or FOB destination. FOB origin means title and risk pass to the retailer at your dock, so a pallet damaged in transit is their claim against the carrier. FOB destination means it is still your problem until it is signed for. A collect shipment on FOB origin terms is the friendliest combination a new supplier can get: they pay, and the risk leaves your building when the trailer doors close.
Read the freight term on the purchase order, not in the guide. The guide states the default; the purchase order states what was actually agreed.
Parcel, LTL or truckload: the thresholds that decide
The guide will give you weight and cube limits that push a shipment into one of three modes, and the boundaries are close to universal even when the exact numbers differ.
Below roughly one hundred and fifty pounds of total shipment weight, and a handful of cartons, you ship small parcel. The retailer usually gives you an account number for their parcel carrier and a service level. You print labels, the driver scans them, nothing else changes.
Above that and up to about fifteen thousand pounds you are in less-than-truckload. Your pallets ride with other people's pallets, the shipment gets a freight class, and a routing request is mandatory. This is where most first retail orders land.
Above roughly ten pallets, or twenty thousand pounds, or when your freight fills the trailer by volume rather than weight, you are into truckload and the guide will tell you to request a dedicated trailer.
Take a made-up example. A stainless insulated bottle packs six to a case, and a case weighs fourteen pounds and measures eighteen by twelve by ten inches. A first purchase order of forty-eight cases is six hundred and seventy-two pounds. That is past parcel, so it goes on pallets. Each pallet holds thirty-six cases in six layers, so forty-eight cases becomes two pallets, one full and one light. Two pallets, under seven hundred pounds: less-than-truckload, routing request required.
Work that out before you quote, because the mode decides the freight cost, and the freight cost decides whether your wholesale price survives contact with reality. The same arithmetic runs through wholesale pricing for Amazon products.
How do you submit a routing request?
A routing request is you telling the retailer what you have ready, and the retailer telling you who is coming to get it. Nothing moves until that round trip completes.
The request is a short form, submitted in the supplier portal or by email to a routing desk, and it asks for the purchase order number, the ship-from address, the date the freight is ready, the number of cartons, the number of pallets, the total weight, the total cube, and whether anything is stackable or hazardous. Some guides want the request a fixed number of business days before the ready date, and almost all of them have a daily cutoff time.
What comes back is a routing instruction: a carrier name, a carrier code, a pickup date, and often a load or routing number that must appear on your paperwork. Sometimes it arrives in an hour and sometimes in two business days, which is why the ready date you put on the form should be the date the pallets are genuinely wrapped and staged, not the date you hope to finish picking.
The most common failure here is not a missed field. It is submitting a routing request for freight that is not ready, then having the assigned carrier arrive to a dock with nothing on it. That is a missed pickup, it is chargeable, and it is remembered.
Delivery appointments and the number you must not lose
Getting a carrier is not the same as getting a delivery slot. Most distribution centres will not take an unannounced trailer, so somebody has to call or log into the scheduling system and book an appointment for the delivery window the purchase order allows.
On collect shipments the carrier usually books the appointment. On prepaid shipments it is on you, and the guide will say so. Either way an appointment number comes back, and that number has to be on the bill of lading and quoted by the driver at the guard house. No number, no dock.
Two dates on the purchase order govern all of this. The ship window is when the freight must leave you. The delivery window, sometimes called the must-arrive-by date, is when it has to be on their dock. Arriving early is a violation in many guides, not a courtesy, because the building has nowhere to put it. Arriving late is the more expensive one, because a late delivery on a promotion can cost the retailer a full-page position in a flyer.
If you already sell through Vendor Central you have met the deduction side of this, and the mechanics are the same across most retailers. The detail is in Amazon Vendor Central chargebacks.
Freight class and the reclass bill you did not expect
Every less-than-truckload shipment carries a freight class, driven mostly by density: how many pounds fit into a cubic foot. Light and bulky costs more to move than heavy and compact, because the trailer runs out of space before it runs out of weight.
The arithmetic is worth doing once. A standard pallet footprint is forty-eight by forty inches. Stack the insulated bottles to a finished height of fifty inches including the pallet, and the shipping unit is forty-eight times forty times fifty, which is ninety-six thousand cubic inches. Divide by one thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight cubic inches in a cubic foot and you get about fifty-five and a half cubic feet. If that pallet weighs four hundred pounds, density is four hundred divided by fifty-five and a half, a little over seven pounds per cubic foot. That is a light, high-class pallet, and it will price like one.
Guess the class low on the bill of lading and the carrier reweighs and remeasures the pallet at their terminal, assigns the real class, and sends a reclass invoice weeks later. On a collect shipment that invoice goes to the retailer, who passes it straight back to you with an administration fee on top. Measure a finished, wrapped pallet once, write the number down, and use it every time.
What has to be on the bill of lading
The bill of lading is the contract of carriage and the receiving document at the same time. A distribution centre clerk reads it in about fifteen seconds, and anything missing turns into a phone call or a refusal.
- The purchase order number, on its own line, one per bill of lading unless the guide explicitly allows consolidation
- Full ship-from and ship-to addresses exactly as written in the guide, including the dock or building number
- The appointment number and, where issued, the routing or load number
- The carrier name, the carrier code and the tracking or pro number
- Piece count, pallet count and total weight, matching what is on the truck rather than what was picked
- Freight class and the commodity description
- The freight term, written as prepaid, collect, or prepaid and charged
- Signature and date from both your shipper and the driver
Keep the signed copy. When a deduction lands three months later claiming a short shipment, the signed bill of lading showing the pallet count the driver accepted is the only argument that works.
Pallets, labels and loading rules
Most guides specify a forty-eight by forty inch four-way wooden pallet in good repair, and a maximum finished height somewhere between forty-eight and sixty inches including the pallet itself. Nothing may overhang the edge, because overhang is what gets crushed by a forklift and turns into a damage claim.
Cases go in interlocked layers, heavier at the bottom, and the whole stack gets stretch wrapped down onto the pallet deck so the load and the pallet move as one piece. Banding without wrap is usually rejected.
Each pallet carries a pallet label on two adjacent sides, at a height the guide specifies, so a scanner can read it whichever way the forklift approaches. Each case carries its own label with the retailer's item number, your item number, the case pack quantity and the purchase order number. If the guide asks for a carton label in a specific barcode format, that format is not negotiable, and printing it on a home laser printer at the wrong scale counts as no label at all.
One more rule that catches new suppliers: one purchase order per pallet. Mixing two orders on a pallet to save a slot on the truck saves you nothing and guarantees a receiving discrepancy.
What happens if you ship your own carrier anyway
It always looks reasonable in the moment. The routing desk has not replied, the ship window closes tomorrow, and your own carrier can collect this afternoon for a price you are happy to swallow.
Here is what follows. The freight arrives at a building that has no appointment for it and no record of that carrier. Best case, it is turned away at the gate and you pay for a wasted trip plus storage while it is re-routed. More often it is received, and then three things happen: an unauthorised routing deduction, the difference between what the retailer's contracted carrier would have cost and what yours did, and a note on your supplier scorecard that follows you into the next buying meeting.
The cost of asking is one email. The cost of guessing is a deduction you will spend an afternoon disputing and probably lose, because the guide told you and you have signed for it somewhere.
The honest summary is this. A routing guide feels like bureaucracy aimed at you, and it is really bureaucracy aimed at two hundred suppliers at once, of which you are the newest and the smallest. Treat the first order as a compliance exercise rather than a revenue event. Once the labels, the pallet spec and the routing request are set up as a repeatable checklist, the second order takes an hour.
If you are further back than this, and the question is still which retailers would take your product at all, that is the cheaper problem to solve first. Paste your product link into WholesalePilot and the preview shows who would plausibly stock it, which tells you whether it is worth building the freight process yet. The channel decision itself is covered in Amazon FBA to retail, and the paperwork that follows the truck is in Amazon seller wholesale invoicing.